150 Organizations Call on Congress to Support Family Child Care

150 national, state, and local organizations from 45 states and Washington D.C. send letter to Congress calling on significant investments and policy for child care in the reconciliation bill

View Letter (PDF)

September 2, 2021

The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee and House Education and Labor Committee pending reconciliation bill presents a crucial opportunity to improve child care in a sustained, systemic way. Your work on this will benefit the developmental, educational, and social-emotional progress of babies and young children, parents who need child care to be able to work and support their families, and the child care providers who have been underpaid for too long.

On behalf of family child care educators across the country, we urge you to prioritize transformational investments and policy for child care in the pending reconciliation bill.

Family child care is the business and practice of early care and education in the early childhood educator’s home. Family child care offers the opportunity for one-on-one relationships and responsive and nurturing care in a small group, family-like setting to support positive outcomes for children.ⁱ Additionally, high-quality family child care has been linked to improvements in children’s cognitive, social-emotional, and physical development.ⁱⁱ Predictors of quality in family child care include licensing, professional support, training, financial resources, and provider experienceⁱⁱⁱ but these pieces have been undermined over the years, due to insufficient federal funds.

Most importantly, these opportunities are right in our neighborhoods. Seventy percent of children in low-income families in regular, non-parental care receive that care within three miles of their home.^iv In communities where price, location and transportation barriers limit child care options, family child care fills a critical need for families. Nationally, one in five children (20%) receiving child care funded by the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) program are cared for in family child care.^v Family child care providers care for 20% of infants younger than age 1 and 20% of toddlers ages 1 to 3, in CCDF-supported child care.^vi

Simply put, family child care is a life line for families and is a critical part of the early care and education system in this country. However, the number of licensed family child care homes fell by 52% from 2005 to 2017.^vii From 2014 to 2017, the drop was 22% and family child care educators share that it is the economics, the costs, aging/retirement, and a challenging job to navigate and carry out without sufficient dollars and resources.

Family child care must be included in the details of child care policy to ensure a healthy child care workforce can meet the needs of families and create early childhood development opportunities for young children. An investment in family child care is an investment in the well-being, safety, and economic stability of families.

At a time when our entire economy has been deeply impacted by the ability for parents to work, family child care programs largely remained open through the pandemic, at great risk to the individuals running those programs and their own families, and at a significant financial cost. The American Rescue Plan relief dollars are providing immediate relief, but transformative improvements are needed to stabilize the fragile system for children, families, and providers. Child care is infrastructure. Parents can’t work to support their families without child care. Importantly, child care providers need to be paid a living wage and receive commensurate benefits to their public school peers to remain healthy, able to provide high-quality care and financially viable.

We urge you to prioritize the following so that family child care can thrive and grow, increasing the supply of high-quality child care and continuing to provide essential services and benefits to families and young children:

• Ensuring that family child care is part of the mixed delivery system for both child care and preK to deliver child care, aftercare, Head Start, Early Head Start, and preK services.
•  Ensuring that payments are based on true operating costs for high-quality care, to allow for fair pay and benefits for all child care providers, including self-employed child care providers, that encompasses paid leave and health care.
• Capping costs and guaranteeing access so that no family under 150 percent of state median income pays more than seven percent of their income on child care and families making under 75 percent of state median income pay nothing. Providers would be able to accept any eligible families, eliminating the need for state or local government-operated waiting lists.
• Investing in family child care networks, meaningful quality initiatives including Family Child Care Accreditation, and affordable, accessible training programs.
• Investing in new family child care programs.
• Providing financial incentives and technical assistance to encourage unlicensed family child care programs to become licensed.

We ask you to invest where children are because child care is early learning and early learning is child care. Please contact us if we can be of assistance or if you would like to meet with a family child care provider to hear their stories and ideas for a better way forward.

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ⁱ NICHD Early Child Care Research Network. (2004). Type of child care and children’s development at 54 months. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 19 (2). Retrieved June 13, 2017 from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0885200604000389.

ⁱⁱ U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Commissioner’s Office of Research and Evaluation, and the Head Start Bureau, Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Evaluation of Head Start Family Child Care Demonstration, Final Report, 2000. Retrieved June 11, 2017 from  http://www.acf.hhs.gov/progrms/opre/resource/evaluation-of-head-start-family-child-care-demonstration-final-report.

ⁱⁱⁱ Raikes, H., Torquati, J., Jung, E., Peterson, C., Atwater, J., Scott, J., and Messner, L. (2013). Family child care in four Midwestern states: Multiple measures of quality and relations to outcomes by licensed status and subsidy participation. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 28(4), 879–892; Forry, N., Iruka, I., Tout, K., Torquati, J., Susman-Stillman, A., Bryant, D., and Daneri, M.P. (2013). Predictors of quality and child outcomes in family child care settings. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 28(4), 893–904.

^iv National Survey of Early Care and Education Project Team (2016). Fact Sheet: How Far Are Early Care and Education Arrangements from Children’s Homes? OPRE Report No. 2016-10, Washington DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Available at: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/opre/research/project/national-survey-of-early-care-and-education-nsece-2010-2014.

^v U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Child Care. (2021). FY 2019 Preliminary Data Table 3 – Average Monthly Percentages of Children Served by Types of Care. Retrieved from https://www.acf.hhs.gov/occ/data/fy-2019-preliminary-data-table-3.

^vi U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Child Care. (2021). FY 2019 Preliminary Data Table 13 – Average Monthly Percentages of Children in Child Care by Age Category and Care Type. Retrieved from https://www.acf.hhs.gov/occ/data/fy-2019-final-data-table-13.  

^vii National Center on Early Childhood Quality Assurance. (2020). Addressing the Decreasing Number of Family Child Care Providers in the United States. Retrieved from https://childcareta.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/public/addressing_decreasing_fcc_providers_revised_march2020_final.pdf